10 Western Books Too Twisted To Be Made Into Films

10 Western Books Too Twisted To Be Made Into Films

Western novel subgenres have given us some of the sickest and most twisted books ever. Some couldn’t possibly work as a movie.

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The Western novel, when written by laconic authors like Louis L’Amour and Max Brand, fills its reader with bucolic imagery of pastel sunsets, picturesque vistas, bustling towns, and charismatic cowboys. But there is a subgenre of Weird Westerns, Horror Westerns, and Gothic Westerns that take the tropes of the Old West and combine them with the macabre, the supernatural, and the truly bizarre.

In recent decades, films have been made to capitalize on this genre like Ravenous, Bone Tomahawk, and The Dark Tower. They continue to be successful with a niche audience, perhaps because viewers don’t want the true horror of the Old West to pollute their fantasies. Perhaps with the popularity of small-screen adaptations like Deadwood, this won’t be the case forever. Here are 10 Western books too twisted to be made into films.

10 BLOOD MERIDIAN

Several of Cormac McCarthy’s novels have been turned into films, including such titles as No Country for Old Men, All The Pretty Horses, and The Road. However, one novel, his fifth and greatest, may never be filmed due to its extreme violence and barbarism.

Blood Meridian has been in one state of production ever since 1985 when McCarthy first published it. It involves a young protagonist named “The Kid” who runs with the Glanton gang, and an antagonist named Judge Holden, a towering man with almost supernatural strength, marksmanship, and practical knowledge. He terrorizes the boy across the West because “war is god.”

9 ABBADON

From the writers of Jonah Hex, another twisted Western prone to brutality comes Abbadon, about an Old West city so steeped in sin there’s no difference between the people on one side of the law or the other. Abbadon was once poised to be a bustling metropolis but a series of grisly murders killed its ambition.

Two lawmen track down Bloody Bill, a known serial killer long thought dead, through the streets of the city. Unfortunately, the true identity of the killer could be someone the lawmen know (including either one of them). Everyone is a suspect in this “graphic” novel.

8 AMERICAN VAMPIRE

The protagonist Skinner Sweet gets his ingratiating name from his penchant for scalping and preference for sweets. He’s a sociopathic gunslinger on the wrong side of the law when he’s turned into a vampire by a group of Old World blood-suckers from Europe.

The sadist becomes not only the first vampire in the Old West but the first American vampire, now granted certain powers over the dead. He rolls back into town mowing down everyone that crossed him in life until he’s eventually hunted down. His story is partially written by Stephen King.

7 A BLOODY BLOODY MESS IN THE WILD WILD WEST

Justin Bienvenue has crafted a chilling horror Western with A Bloody Bloody Mess In The Wild Wild West, which focuses on the small town of Toomswood five years after the Civil War has ended. The tycoon Javier “Bones” Jones has taken over the town, transforming it with his corrupt enterprises.

But it’s he who becomes transformed when he makes a deal with a demon for certain supernatural abilities. Along with his newfound status as a sharpshooter, he also lords over the undead soldiers of the Civil War. But that’s not enough for Jones, so soon he’s killing just for the sake of making a giant zombie army.

6 WRAITHS OF THE BROKEN LAND

S. Craig Zahler has had one of his novels filmed, the surprisingly quality Bone Tomahawk, which has already become a cult classic among Western Horror aficionados. But Wraiths of the Broken Land may be too graphic for him to bring to the big screen, as it reads like a Quentin Tarantino novel.

The story begins with a woman waking up with a dead turtle stuffed up inside her, and doesn’t let down with the vividly twisted imagery. It chronicles the Plugford family and their hired guns as they try to track down the whereabouts of two kidnapped sisters who have been sold into prostitution.

5 SKULL MOON

Tim Curran, an authority on weird Westerns, sought to combine the supernatural and mythical with the Wild West in this spooky revenge fantasy. Skull Moon begins with the lynching of a young boy, the son of a Blackfoot medicine man, by masked riders known only as the Gang of Ten.

Soon the riders begin to die off one by one, flayed alive by an evil presence from Blackfeet folklore. To control the situation, Marshal Joe Longtree is brought in to investigate the slayings around Wolf Creek but soon finds himself going up against an unspeakable horror whose hunger can’t be sated.

4 SKIN MEDICINE

Another suspenseful Western from genre authority Tim Curran, Skin Medicine follows the bounty hunter Tyler Cabe as he tracks a deadly killer throughout the Old West, who may or may not be of this world. The Sin City Strangler, as he’s known in the press, is characterized by strangling prostitutes and then surgically disassembling their bodies.

Something like the legend of Jack the Ripper in Civil War America, this book looks at the void in the psychopathic mind by paying grisly attention to the details of its handiwork. As readers get lost in the labyrinthine mining community of Whisper Lake, they are unprepared for what the mystery of the Sin City Strangler reveals.

3 DEADSTOCK

Deadstock is a supernatural Western that combines gothic horror with the truly bizarre in the Old West, beginning with the mystery of cow mutilation at Groom ranch. Sam Dryden, a lawman with a special greenwood gun and Raisy packing her “deck of knives” must solve the case.

There’s even a touch of science fiction when you account for the levitating zombies and the fact that Dryden’s gun sucks the life from him when he uses it. The novel doesn’t do an excessive amount of explaining the reason for all the supernatural aspects, mostly because Ian Rogers plans to write more in the series down the line.

2 THE MAGIC WAGON

For fans of traveling circuses, gypsy curses, wrestling apes named Rot Toe, and magical mayhem, The Magic Wagon by Joe R. Landsdale is sure to tantalize the tastes of anyone into Weird Westerns, but could all of its bizarre features be properly featured in a full-length film?

Characterized like True Grit with a little bit of Billy the Kid vs. Dracula, it follows a young orphan, an ex-slave, and the rest of a strange misfit carnival as they proceed through the Old West, their “magic wagon” turning into a stage on which they perform.

1 A BOOK OF TONGUES (BOOK 1 OF THE HEXSLINGER SERIES)

Gemma Files certainly crammed a lot of different aspects of a lot of different genres into her Western novel A Book of Tongues, the first in the Hexslinger series. Ed Morrow, a Pinkerton agent, has embedded himself in the gang of “Reverend” Asher Rook, a magician who made a pact with a Mayan goddess of death to acquire dark magical abilities.

This book is packed with undead gunslingers, macabre Mayan mythology, corrupt men of the clergy, gay romance, and a sense of true dread, but it all seems to be barely enough for one book to contain. No doubt a full film would collapse under the weight of all the moving parts.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/western-horror-weird-gothic-novels-wont-work-movie/

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